The Education Gadfly Weekly

Those of us at Fordham have strived over the course of our organization’s two-decade existence to stay open to new evidence and to be willing to change our minds. For example, we shifted from the notion of "letting a thousand flowers bloom" when it came to charter schools to acknowledging that "some weeding is necessary" after multiple studies showed just how poor the achievement of some charters was turning out to be, and just how hard it was to actually shut such failing charter schools down. And there have been other smaller shifts over the years, too, on funding, teacher diversity, and more.

Of course, we are fortunate to be an independent think tank, with our own endowment and a mission to follow the evidence wherever it leads. It's not so easy to keep an open mind when you're an interest group, like a teachers union, which is charged with protecting its members' concerns. The unions are never going to say, "You know, we've changed our minds based on the evidence, and we’ve decided we really like these non-unionized charter schools." So for them the game is about finding evidence that supports their position and ignoring, if not discrediting, the rest.

We see that on our side of the reform fence too, as when some of our friends decided that test scores weren't valid measures of student success after multiple rigorous studies showed negative test score impacts of private school choice programs. Thus the energetic effort to discredit test scores as predictors of long term outcomes.

But back to reform opponents. There used to be a fierce debate about whether kids in charter schools were learning more than kids in traditional public schools. But now that dozens of rigorous studies have found that kids of color in urban charter schools learn significantly more on average than their district peers, the unions and other opponents have had to find other arguments to make their case, while working to discredit the impact evaluations.

So they now have a two-part argument.

First, they argue that the charter school advantage is due entirely to “creaming.” For example, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the co-chairman of United Teachers Los Angeles attributed the success of charter schools to “having classes filled with motivated, high-performing students.” It's apparently not enough to claim that some of the advantage comes from selection—the likelihood that families who choose charters are different in important ways from those who don't. But all of it?

Second, they argue that, regardless of how good or bad charters might be for the kids they serve, their growth is hurting traditional public schools and the kids who are left behind there. This argument has the benefit of polling extremely well, and has been used to great—or terrible—effect in the current California charter school wars.

With that long context in mind, Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement, Fordham’s new, highly significant analysis by senior research and policy associate, David Griffith, examines the relationship between charter school market share and student achievement—not just for the kids in charters or the kids in district schools but for everybody.

It sounds straightforward, but to our knowledge it is the first time anyone has conducted such a study.

We have the CREDO evaluations and other studies looking at the performance of students in charter versus district schools. And there have been many studies of “competitive” or “spillover” effects of charter schools on district schools, most of which find that competition from charter schools does not harm achievement in nearby district schools, and sometimes boosts it.

Rising Tide doesn't look at the differences between charter and district kids. In fact, we can't distinguish between them because our data source, the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), includes the academic progress that all students in a given geographic community made compared to students in other geographic communities nationwide. In other words, the academic performance of charter schools is included in what SEDA refers to as the “geographic school district,” regardless of whether the charter schools operate independently of the district in which they are located (although we do know what percentage of students attended charters).

Griffith spent an entire year getting acquainted with the dataset and examining the best way to model “charter market share.” For example, because we’re really interested in the achievement of specific racial subgroups, it makes more sense to consider the effects of “charter market share” within those subgroups than across them. So his findings focus on the relationship between the percentage of black, white, or Hispanic students who enrolled in charters and the average achievement of all black, white, or Hispanic students in a geographic school district, including those in traditional public schools.

In the end, what we learned was quite simple, and quite powerful: For large urban districts, the more black and Hispanic students are enrolled in charter schools, the greater achievement is for black and Hispanic students.

This has huge implications for the two arguments that charter opponents are making.

First, it provides new evidence that creaming can't explain the entirety of the charter school advantage in urban districts. Because if charter schools' success was truly an "illusion," as the Wall Street Journal author charges, we'd see no gains for communities with greater charter market share. Higher test scores in charters would be canceled out by lower test scores in district schools, driven by the transfer of higher-achieving students from district to charter schools. It would be a zero-sum game.

Instead, we find achievement gains in districts with more charters. What that implies is that the additional learning that's happening in charter schools is not coming at the expense of less learning in district schools. It's additive. And that implies that kids in charters really are learning more—not because of who the kids are, but because of what the schools are doing.

The findings also have implications for opponents’ argument that charter schools are hurting traditional public schools. We suspected that wasn’t the case, based on existing evidence, at least for the district schools located closest to new charter schools, at least when it comes to test scores. But maybe the performance of other students in the district was being harmed in some way. We don't see any evidence of that in this study.

Of course, this one analysis won't end the charter school wars. Perhaps some scholars or bystanders who mildly opposed charter schools will change their minds, now that there's even more evidence that they really are doing something to help black and Hispanic kids learn more, and that they aren't hurting the outcomes of students in district schools. Yet we suspect that most critics will continue to oppose charter schools because their opposition has always been based on bread and butter interests, like the bargaining power of teachers unions, rather than evidence or reason.

But, charter supporters, stand proud. These schools really are getting better results for children of color, and not just because they are attracting the most motivated families.

That's good news with which to kick off the new school year.

Last week in Austin, at the annual “summit” sponsored by the PIE (“Policy Innovators in Education”) Network, prizes were conferred on a handful of state-based education-reform groups that had accomplished remarkable feats in the previous year, this despite the reform-averse mood that chills much of the nation.

The most prestigious of those awards, with recipients chosen by votes of PIE members, is the “game changer of year” accolade, and last week it went to a quintet of organizations that, in three states, made notable progress in widening access to advanced coursework for traditionally underserved youngsters.

The prize came with this citation:

Advocates in Washington, Colorado, and North Carolina led separate, breakthrough campaigns that addressed a single issue: traditionally underserved students are placed in advanced courses less frequently than their peers—even though they are equally prepared. These concurrent campaigns, led independently by each state-based organization, highlight the power and synergy of leaders making smart policies serve their students. And while the policy in each state looks different, their mission is the same—reduce historic barriers to advanced course access for underrepresented students.

The winning team from Washington State consisted of Stand for Children Washington, the Black Education Strategy Roundtable, and Partnership for Learning; in Colorado, the heavy lifting was done by DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) Colorado; and in the Tarheel State it was BEST NC.

I had the pleasure of sharing the podium at a well-attended session with Stand/Washington and DFER/Colorado (as well as Educate Texas), where we examined the challenges of creating enough “advanced” education options for enough kids—AP, IB, dual credit, early college, etc.—and then ensuring that the doorways into them are opened wide and “nontraditional” students are enabled and encouraged to enter.

(My role was to explain the democratization of Advanced Placement, a topic explored at length in Andrew Scanlan’s and my new book on AP.)

It was heartening to find the PIE Network community taking ownership of this challenge and lauding members that are making successful moves to meet it, the more so because doing anything special for smart kids so often gets trashed as a form of “tracking” and as yet another bonus for the already fortunate.

But here, as in those three states, we’re talking about kids who are also unfortunate. They may be smart, or perhaps just motivated and hard-working, but historically their demographics wouldn’t have destined many of them for intellectually challenging coursework and often their schools wouldn’t even have offered much of it. So there’s a powerful equity—even social justice—case to be made for righting this wrong. If we want to make the American meritocracy more equitable (the topic of Paul Tough’s new book on college), that means not treating all poor kids equally. It means enabling those with academic promise to zoom ahead, just as we do for rich kids with academic promise (a point made by my colleague and friend Robert Pondiscio in his fantastic new book about Success Academy).

And that’s just the beginning. I see at least three more compelling reasons to take on this challenge.

First, social mobility. To be blunt, the poor kids with the greatest potential to boost themselves and their families into the middle class and beyond are poor kids with great academic promise. But that will only happen if the education system reaches out to cultivate their potential (along with that of other kids, of course). For the most part, these kids don’t have skilled navigators at home, and their families don’t have the cash to buy their way into posh suburban or private schools. They depend on opportunities and options created by the education system—including, of course, suitable school-choice options.

Second, human capital. If America is to be safe, prosperous, civically strong, and culturally vibrant in the decades ahead, it needs leaders—of enterprise, science and technology, education, literature and arts, government—that have been educated to the max. But it also needs leaders that look more “like America.” If we continue to draw most of tomorrow’s leaders from the ranks of the past, we’ll widen our divides, exacerbate our differences, and fail to make the most of our human capital.

Third, personalizing learning. If we batch-process all our students, insist that they sit in “grade-level” classes, and fail to create ways of individualizing and accelerating their learning opportunities, we defy intelligent personalization and allow our fear of tracking to create unteachable classrooms, irrelevant curricula, and a lot of kids who are bored stiff and turned off by what we call school.

Every kid deserves to maximize his or her potential and enjoy as many opportunities as possible. That includes youngsters with exceptional promise or talent, no matter their background. Hurrah for these great, state-based ed-reformers that not only understand the urgency of this, but are resourceful and dogged enough to effect important changes in policy and practice. And hurrah for the PIE Network for honoring them.

Editor’s note: At last week’s PIE Network Summit in Austin, Texas, Fordham senior fellow Robert Pondiscio was asked to participate in a panel discussion on “What is the purpose of education?” His answer to the question consisted of the following remarks.

At the end of a kid’s public education, there is one question that we should ask that kid and hope like hell he answers, “Yes.” It’s this question:

“Are you in?”

We were invited for this session to “think big and share ideas about whether and how the purpose of education has evolved.” This should be an awkward subject for those of us who still proudly think of ourselves as ed reformers.

What could be a bigger or grander vision than our vision of making schools work for every child? Particularly for those families least likely to have had a productive relationship with a place called a school.

But when it came time to deliver on that grand vision, we suddenly thought small. Measurable. Deliverable. And that’s when we lost our way, and more importantly when we lost the hearts and minds of the American people. Wendy Kopp’s “One day, all children…” became “three days for all children to take the state reading test. And two more days for math. And every day until then, all children will practice for the test.”

I’m not anti-testing. And I’m not anti-accountability. But I am anti-dishonesty, and I think we’ve been dishonest with ourselves about the effects of our work. We’ve changed fundamentally a child’s experience of school in ways a lot of Americans just don’t like. And they’re not wrong.

Last month I had a Twitter exchange with my friends Richard Whitmire and Charles Sahm about accountability and the question we’re here to talk about. Richard put forth the idea that “college is the new high school,” so that college success, not test scores, should be the most important metric.

I told him about the son of my next-door neighbor in upstate New York, who joined the Navy, got married, and is raising a family in Virginia. He posted a picture of himself on Facebook a few weeks ago, in uniform, with his daughter. “I have missed a lot of things over the past few years,” he wrote, “but I was finally able to make it to something. First day of kindergarten.” This is a young man, deeply invested in American life and institutions, serving his country, and a success story we can be proud of. College played no part in it, but something went very right. He’s in. All the way in.

Charles pointed to Indiana, which he said is trying to figure out an accountability metric for high school students that includes “Three Es”—postsecondary rates of college enrollment, employment, and enlistment. I like that frame a lot, but said I’d add a fourth E—civic engagement. Then Richard said something that crystallized all of this for me. “Sounds good,” he tweeted. “But not as easily measured as the others.”

Think about that for a moment. What's most important is hard to measure, so we don’t try. Instead we make what we can measure the most important thing—regardless of how that affects the thing we're actually trying to fix. And then we wonder why people are upset. Don’t they know we’re the good guys? Who else is going to tell them the hard truths about how their schools aren’t really all that great?

This time tomorrow I’ll be teaching my civics seminar to high school seniors at Democracy Prep in Harlem. I certainly hope they’re all in college next year. And I hope they’re college graduates four years from now. But the metric I care most about is how they would answer that question:

“Are you in?”

Obviously every American child should leave us after thirteen years of education on the public dime with the ability to read and do math. But they should also be invested in their community and country. We should hope that they see a role for themselves and want to be a part of it.

Those of us in civic education think it’s our job to teach kids to become civically engaged, but school is not where kids learn civic engagement. It’s where they experience it. Where they feel the civic engagement of others, of adults whose job it is to get them bought in, and with a feeling of attachment to civil society. Hopefully they see a role for themselves in American life, and they’re eager to get busy doing it.

Maybe college, maybe not. But certainly a desire to do what all of us are doing here today. Get out of bed, go to work, do our part, keep things moving forward, and try to leave things a little better for the ones who’ll come after us.

Something I’ve become fond of saying is that the first and most important relationship most children have with a civic institution is with a school. As that one goes, so go the rest.

My gut tells me we’re failing at this, and failing badly. On the one hand, we’ve reduced schooling to a dry and dull regimen of prep and test. On the other, we’ve convinced too many of our children—for reasons that are real, important, and must be honestly confronted—that this country is fatally flawed, structurally racist, and beyond redemption.

Frankly, I think some of us are trying to convince them of this because we are ourselves are convinced of it. Why should we expect them to want in when we tell them—when we believe ourselves—that the country that they had the misfortune to be born into has nothing to offer them but oppression and a determination to break their bodies?

Let me anticipate the question and answer it honestly. How will we measure this? How will we hold schools accountable? I have no damned idea. What I know is that we are disrupters in this room and we have perhaps succeeded a little too well. We have disrupted the thing that matters most of all: our school’s vital public mission to get every generation of children to say, “Yes, count me in. I’m in.”

Let me leave you with a quote from Robert F. Kennedy. He was talking about measuring gross national product, but the sentiment applies to our work in education, the things we measure, the things we don’t measure, and the messages we send to children about what matters, who we want to be, and who we want them to help us be. 

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

In conclusion, I’d challenge all of us who work in education to ask ourselves the same question that we should ask students at the end of their public education:

“Are you in?”

It’s long been surmised that the socioeconomic achievement gap is caused by—or at least, in part, persists because of—a teacher quality gap. Low-performing, high-poverty schools have significant issues that lead many educators to leave, whether to a different, less challenging position, or out of the profession entirely, contributing to measurable differences in teacher quality. A recent literature review by Dan Goldhaber, Vanessa Quince, and Roddy Theobald sheds some light on this dynamic and offers some ways to address it.

The authors look at research conducted over the last twenty years, but focus primarily on the last five. They begin with the studies from the early 2000s that examined disparities in teacher qualification, defined usually by a combination of college degree held, certification attained, and experience accumulated. Less qualified teachers were more likely to teach at low-performing schools. In the present decade, however, researchers have gone further and examined different teachers’ effect on students using value-added metrics and student test data, and they usually look at achievement’s relationship to four variables: teacher hiring, teacher attrition, teacher mobility within school districts, and teacher mobility across school districts. Because of data availability and friendliness to such research, the bulk of recent studies have examined North Carolina and Washington State.

The authors find that different locales have different primary causes of their quality gaps. In North Carolina, for example, the largest drivers of the gap were cross-district mobility and hiring, which contributed equally. In Washington State, however, teacher transfers played a smaller role, while hiring practices were by far the biggest cause. Goldhaber, Quince, and Theobald also find that, across the country, effective teachers are more likely to leaving the profession or transfer out of disadvantaged schools, leaving less effective ones behind.

Moreover, student-teacher apprenticeships appear to be strong predictors of whether teachers will serve in disadvantaged schools, in large part because teachers often train in more advantaged schools than the ones they end up serving in, making them more likely to transfer to schools similar to where they trained. This is especially true for effective teachers. The authors cite a 2016 study in Washington State that found that 40 percent of teachers began their teaching career in the same district as their student teaching experience, and student teachers with better GPAs and licensure scores are more likely to train in, and therefore remain at, more advantaged districts than peers with lower GPAs and scores.

To help narrow these gaps and their causes, Goldhaber, Quince, and Theobald offer intuitive, evidence-based policy suggestions. They recommend using financial incentives such as retention bonuses for educators who serve in disadvantaged schools, improving working conditions at low-performing schools, improving hiring practices at disadvantaged schools to weed out less effective candidates, and especially training more student teachers at low-performing schools.

In all, the literature review provides us with a useful and accessible reflection on the last twenty years of research on teacher effectiveness. Good educators are vital to closing achievement gaps, and understanding what attracts them to schools can help policymakers and school leaders connect them to the schools that need them most. The chief takeaway is that low-performing schools need help hiring more effective teachers, and that an ideal starting point is in training more teachers at these schools.

SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber, Vanessa Quince, and Roddy Theobold, “Teacher quality gaps in U.S. public schools: Trends, sources, and implications,” Phi Delta Kappan (2019).

On this week’s podcast, Nina Rees, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about David’s new Fordham study of how charter market share affects student achievement for kids in both charter and district schools. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how the geographic isolation of K–12 schools affects education policies.

Amber's Research Minute

Chris Curran and James Kitchin, “Documenting Geographic Isolation of Schools and Examining the Implications for Education Policy,” Educational Policy (July 2019).